


a law just short of delusion

by IssyLily



Category: Killing Eve (TV 2018)
Genre: (argument for american readers), Angst, Betrayal, Bittersweet Ending, Cold War, F/F, F/M, Hurt/Comfort, MI5 - Freeform, MI6, Mentions of Murder, Old Friends, Villaneve, and sexy times, because I love her, eve stops by for a chat, mainly a character study of carolyn, mentioned - Freeform, one year on from kenny's death, secret spies who are bad at feelings, they have a bit of a tiff
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-12
Updated: 2020-06-12
Packaged: 2021-03-04 05:35:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,177
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24688486
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/IssyLily/pseuds/IssyLily
Summary: It's been a year since Kenny's death, and Carolyn has (not) coped well. Eve drops by, having kept her distance since what happened at Paul's, and tensions begin to rise as the two women wrestle towards an honest conversation.𝘌𝘷𝘦 𝘯𝘢𝘳𝘳𝘰𝘸𝘦𝘥 𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘦𝘺𝘦𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘦𝘳. “𝘈𝘳𝘦 𝘺𝘰𝘶 𝘨𝘰𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘱 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘴 𝘢𝘵 𝘮𝘦 𝘢𝘭𝘭 𝘯𝘪𝘨𝘩𝘵?” 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘴𝘬𝘦𝘥, 𝘢𝘭𝘳𝘦𝘢𝘥𝘺 𝘯𝘰𝘴𝘪𝘯𝘨 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘴𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘵 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘺𝘦𝘵 𝘵𝘰 𝘥𝘪𝘴𝘴𝘪𝘱𝘢𝘵𝘦 𝘸𝘪𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘰𝘶𝘴𝘦.“𝘠𝘰𝘶 𝘣𝘳𝘰𝘬𝘦 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘰 𝘮𝘺 𝘩𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘯𝘯𝘪𝘷𝘦𝘳𝘴𝘢𝘳𝘺 𝘰𝘧 𝘮𝘺 𝘴𝘰𝘯’𝘴 𝘮𝘶𝘳𝘥𝘦𝘳,” 𝘊𝘢𝘳𝘰𝘭𝘺𝘯 𝘳𝘦𝘱𝘭𝘪𝘦𝘥, 𝘳𝘢𝘵𝘩𝘦𝘳 𝘮𝘰𝘳𝘦 𝘴𝘰𝘧𝘵𝘭𝘺 𝘵𝘩𝘢𝘯 𝘴𝘩𝘦 𝘩𝘢𝘥 𝘪𝘯𝘵𝘦𝘯𝘥𝘦𝘥 𝘧𝘰𝘳 𝘵𝘩𝘦 𝘢𝘤𝘤𝘶𝘴𝘢𝘵𝘪𝘰𝘯 𝘵𝘰 𝘤𝘰𝘮𝘦 𝘰𝘶𝘵, “𝘐 𝘵𝘩𝘪𝘯𝘬 𝘐’𝘮 𝘦𝘯𝘵𝘪𝘵𝘭𝘦𝘥 𝘵𝘰 𝘵𝘢𝘬𝘦 𝘢 𝘧𝘦𝘸 ‘𝘤𝘩𝘦𝘢𝘱 𝘴𝘩𝘰𝘵𝘴’.”.A character study of the enigmatic Carolyn Martens.
Relationships: Carolyn Martens/Konstantin Vasiliev, Eve Polastri/Villanelle | Oksana Astankova
Comments: 10
Kudos: 68





	a law just short of delusion

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the magnificent Soviet-sounding ballad "This Must Be the Place I Waited Years to Leave" by the Pet Shop Boys. Would recommend a listen.

She needed to hire a gardener.

No really, the flowers had wilted before they had had the chance to blossom, the fence had seen better days, and god knows she valued appearance and privacy enough to spend the money. It would be a good few weeks’ work, and the only time she had allotted for such an endeavour was a long way off yet.

The garden was just one of the various things that she had let slide over the past year. She had seen more of the four walls of her newly baptised office than she had her home; it had been months since she had stepped into the garden, felt the sharp blades of grass on the soles of her feet, watched the sun disappear behind a crush of orange-tinted clouds. Not that she had done any of that with an alarming frequency beforehand. Regardless, she would appreciate being able to do so without having to confront what was, frankly, an abyss of overgrown weeds and rusting furniture.

 _Another evening_ , Carolyn promised to herself as she headed inside.

The chaos that had erupted in the garden could scarcely be seen within the house. The only indications of its owner being somewhat vacant were the thin sheen of dust across the living room mantelpiece, and the fading spines of the hundreds of books adorning the study’s bookcase. This house was no longer a refuge – she had abandoned all pretence of having such a place anywhere in the world. It was just somewhere to lay her head for a few hours away from the relentless, endless work that awaited her in the office.

It seemed that one of MI5’s chief investigators fleeing the country with a known serial assassin generated rather a lot of paperwork. Who knew?

(And then there was the case of her continuing investigation into The Twelve, but she tried to keep that one out of her office. She just made use of the work printer. It wasn’t like she was going to waste her own money on the ink).

Speaking of certain MI5 investigators, Carolyn really did wish that Eve would take more care when breaking into her home. Not only had she scratched the lock on her front door when practicing last week, but she had left a large boot print on the corners of several envelopes that had been posted through the letterbox yesterday morning.

She hadn’t seen Eve since the Bradwell Incident, and she hadn’t expected to see her again either. But then again, she had always underappreciated the value of sentiment. And today was an important day for the sentimental.

Carolyn braced herself, not fully knowing what to expect – she hoped Eve hadn’t brought Villanelle with her, it really would not do for yet _another_ Russian spy to invite themself into her home – but she turned the kitchen doorknob sharply before the doubt had time to settle in.

“Good evening, Eve,” Carolyn said with a polite smile that failed to betray any of the irritation – and lingering surprise – she was feeling.

Eve looked annoyed at the lack of reaction, which added an extra second to Carolyn’s smile.

She looked…well. Probably better than Carolyn did at any rate, after more than a few months of fourteen-hour days and not enough sleep. It seemed that Villanelle’s taste for high fashion had finally begun to rub off, going by Eve’s checkerboard brogues or her black cashmere jumper. There was a flicker of _her_ Eve still in there though – a parka coat hung over the back of one of her kitchen chairs told her that.

 _Her Eve_ , Carolyn thought wryly, as if the woman before her had ever really belonged to her, to the department. It had all been a means to an end. Disposable. Even now, she couldn’t help but feel a little betrayed. The world had dropped away with Kenny, and then her protégée had run off too.

“Hi Carolyn. It’s been a while. I was waiting for you, but you got home later than I was expecting,” Eve replied in a level voice, though Carolyn knew it was delivered through slightly gritted teeth. Eve ran a hand through her dense curls, and then knotted her hands together in front of her as if in prayer.

Carolyn hoped she wasn’t here to repent. She didn’t have time for caterwauling, and she wanted to go to bed.

“And you thought you would just let yourself in? No matter,” she said, moving across the kitchen to the counter and holding up the bag in her right hand, “Would you prefer the lasagne or the cannelloni? Both taken from the canteen, I’m afraid; I wasn’t sure if you were a vegetarian or not.”

Eve rolled her eyes, exasperated, and snapped back, “Oh for the love of-”. _Rumbled_. At Carolyn’s raised eyebrow (Eve’s habit of forgetting quite _who_ she was dealing with clearly hadn’t disappeared), she cut herself off prematurely and gestured, “The cannelloni I guess.”

Carolyn nodded, and placed both Tupperware containers into the microwave. As she turned, she asked, “Did you know that the majority of detained murderers in the 20th century were vegetarians?”

It was incredible the things you could learn from Wikipedia. And Andrew in the office did tend to speak so slowly during meetings.

Eve narrowed her eyes at her. “Are you going to take cheap shots at me all night?” she asked, already nosing into the tension that had yet to dissipate within the house.

“You broke into my home on the anniversary of my son’s murder,” Carolyn replied, rather more softly than she had intended for the accusation to come out, “I think I’m entitled to take a few ‘cheap shots’.”

Eve stilled at that, and the bitterness in her voice disappeared as quickly as it had arrived.

Kenny had been gone a year, and in many horrible ways, it felt like he had been gone far longer than that. Having no one to come home to, and the pace at which work had proceeded, had meant that the days had flown by like hours, and Carolyn felt as though she had aged a decade in the twelve months since his demise. And yet despite the time, the wound was still open – constantly being torn anew with every movement that she made. There was a silence in her life so deafening that she had memorised the sound and rhythm of her own heartbeat in the night.

Carolyn came to, startled out of her reverie by the ping of the microwave. There was a moment where she and Eve just looked at each other, and Carolyn remembered that despite it all, Eve had cared about her son too. It hadn’t been just _her_ loss.

“I’ll take the lasagne then,” Eve said, cutting through the thick silence, and Carolyn pondered the meaning of her sentence for a moment before remembering the food.

“Just as well,” she replied, taking both from the microwave and placing them onto the kitchen table. Passing out cutlery as she did, Carolyn sat down opposite Eve and cut into her pasta, holding a slice up from the tub, “There is always something deeply concerning about the consistency of this spinach.”

* * *

“So, how are you doing?” Eve asked tentatively as they made their ways through their respective meals. Carolyn wished she hadn’t given Eve the option to take the lasagne. The cannelloni really was very sad.

She let out a little laugh; she couldn’t remember the last time someone had dared to ask. If her subordinates at the Russian desk, or anyone else at MI6 for that matter, had thought she was a hard woman before, then they surely saw her as steel now. She still had the ability to be kind – and to put niceness on as if it were another brand of makeup – but patience was no longer in her nature at all. That had snapped the night she had seen Eve last, and there was a body with a bullet in its head buried six feet under to prove it.

Truthfully, she didn’t know how to answer the question. Nothing ever stopped. She hadn’t had time to check how she was feeling. She didn’t dare go near it. So she had ignored it instead.

“The real question, Eve, is why you are here,” Carolyn said, taking another bite of her disappointing cannelloni and wishing she had poured herself a whiskey before she sat down. No one could be expected to get through this kind of interaction without a little help, she reasoned.

Eve fidgeted a little with her cutlery, thumbing the fork for a comfort it couldn’t provide. She tucked a strand of hair behind her ear and tried to avoid Carolyn’s eye.

“I know… I know things are weird with us now,” she explained apprehensively, expecting Carolyn to react to that ( _she wouldn’t give her the satisfaction_ ), “But I loved Kenny. I did. What happened to him- what Konstantin did-”

Carolyn’s stomach turned at the mention of his name, but Eve appeared not to notice, too enveloped in her own memorialising to notice.

“-It broke my heart. And I just thought that today might be a good day to break the ice. I’m- I don’t know if we’re coming back just yet, but I wanted to check in with you,” she finished, and for all of her faults, Carolyn had never known Eve to be insincere. Especially when it came to her son.

Though the word _we’re_ was some small cause for concern.

She was almost touched by the gesture, she truly was, but Carolyn still didn’t know what to say. She hadn’t had a proper conversation in weeks, and she was rusty. It didn’t help that she was _not good_ at talking about these things.

“I know you miss him too,” Eve said quietly, and there was a jolty movement in her hand, as if she wanted to reach out to grasp Carolyn’s and had then thought better of it.

Carolyn put her cutlery down and rested her hands beneath her chin. She looked down the barrel of her nose at Eve, and decided that, given this was the only conversation she was likely to have with anyone who knew what had happened over the past year, she may as well let some of the pain loose.

“When I was working my way up at the Russian Desk, the previous Head was somewhat of a mentor to me,” she began, and Eve leaned back in her chair to hear the story. Carolyn cleared her throat and continued, “We spent a lot of time working together, and we trusted each other implicitly. You of all people can understand how rare a thing that is. And during this time, I started to…doubt myself. Doubt whether I was achieving anything as a mother, whether I was acting responsibly for my children.”

Carolyn stared briefly out of the window at the weeds crawling across her patio, and wondered if she had ever been capable of caring properly for anything.

“So I asked her one day. I asked her ‘Do you think I’m a good mother?’. And do you know what she said?”

Eve shook her head.

Carolyn smiled, or grimaced – one or the other.

“She said ‘I didn’t know you had kids’. Geraldine was thirteen at the time, and Kenny had just turned seven. Bear in mind that this was a woman that I spent most of my waking hours with.”

Eve’s eyes widened, and there was a profound sympathy in her face that Carolyn wanted to hate.

“We had worked together for four years at this point, and I had never once mentioned my children. Of course, the workplace is no place for that kind of information, but not once. In four years. In any case, it wasn’t the ringing endorsement that I had been hoping for.”

The silence lingered, heavy and awkward. Eve looked sad and concerned, and Carolyn envied her ability to show her feelings with such ease, that Eve had given herself permission to be so open with them.

“Do you want a drink?” Carolyn eventually asked, more for her own benefit than her guest’s, but she figured they could both stand to wind down a little bit.

“Oh god yeah,” Eve replied enthusiastically, getting up from the kitchen table and following Carolyn into the living room.

She poured them both two fingers of whiskey and nestled into what she supposed was her favourite corner of the sofa. They watched the rain through the window wall and sat quietly as the droplets of water raced across the glass like tadpoles. It wasn’t like them to sit together for so long without saying anything. Their old interactions had been rapid, quickfire, a thousand questions pressed into the few seconds that could both spare – lives were on the line, and there was always a fire that needed putting out. It was disconcerting that there was no urgency now. Just two people digesting canteen food and a grief that would probably never disappear.

“Have you heard from him at all?” Eve pressed after an unknown amount of time, and Carolyn didn’t need to bother enquiring further as to whom she meant.

“No. It’s been radio silence. In a way it feels just like the Cold War all over again.”

“Do you miss him?”

Carolyn sighed, and took a sip – no, scratch that, actually a swig – of her drink before resting it back on the arm of the sofa.

“I’m never sure. I’m never sure if I do, and I’m never sure if I should,” she replied honestly, voicing a doubt that had been plaguing her for months.

She and Konstantin had done plenty of awful things to one another, but so rarely had they lied. They had manipulated one another, twisted facts and dates and shipping invoices and translations, spent days fucking in seedy hotel rooms just to disrupt each other’s schedules, but Carolyn could count on one hand the amount of times they had lied. If they were going to start now, Carolyn hoped somewhere deep inside of her that it wouldn’t be over her son.

“What would you do, you know, if you saw him again?” Eve asked, and Carolyn smiled at her.

“Do you know something that I don’t?” she said, and Eve returned the small smile. A brief moment of peace.

“No, I don’t, sorry, I’m just curious, I guess. I never understood the two of you,” Eve said, looking at the ice in the bottom of her glass. Carolyn saw the cogs turning in her mind and dreaded her next question. “Were you guys in love?”

“Don’t be childish Eve,” Carolyn said reproachfully, nearly a reprimand, an exact mimic of the tone she brought out for junior ministers fresh from Oxbridge who needed straightening out.

Eve didn’t seem phased by the snappy retort, and pushed further. “So if it wasn’t love, what was it?”

Carolyn breathed in and tried to condense thirty years of friendship into a comprehendible sentence.

“It was…complicated. Nebulous. He was on the other side, but he was…is also my oldest friend,” she contemplated, trying to find the right word for their relationship. _Friend_ sounded so bare, so insolent, as if they were still children in the playground. Konstantin had been far more than that, and for far longer. She smirked into her whiskey, “And then with all of the…bells and whistles on top of that.”

Despite the setting, and despite the fact that she had broken into her house ( _no, she hadn’t forgotten that tidbit_ ), Eve gave Carolyn her signature judgemental look. In a strangely masochistic way, Carolyn had almost missed it.

“Don’t look at me like that Eve,” she said scornfully, regardless, “We both know that you don’t have to be in love with someone to have sex with them. In fact, it often takes rather a lot of the pressure off. There’s suddenly much more room to be…selfish.”

“Oh gross,” Eve responded immediately, and Carolyn could have laughed out loud.

“So you guys were a thing all the way through the War?” Eve enquired, desperately seeking some levity to the conversation – a levity that Carolyn was all too willing to grant.

“Through much of it, yes. MI6 had a lot of use for someone who was so willing to switch sides as and when needed. Our…relationship seemed to follow the trajectory of the War itself. You should have seen us when the Berlin Wall came down.”

Eve made another face, and Carolyn slowed down on the whiskey. She hadn’t intended to reveal that detail. What a night it had been though. Watching the wall crumble under axe and hammer and clawing fists, and then stowing away to a rundown hotel and living that euphoria within one another. There had been copious drinks for a few days afterwards, and neither of them had bothered to get dressed until they needed to fly home.

“You were together that night? Wouldn’t you have both needed to be, I don’t know, _in the office_? Wasn’t that kind of a major thing in Russian-Anglo relations?” Eve said, almost admonishingly, as if she were disappointing in Carolyn for shirking her duty for sex.

Carolyn crossed one leg over the other and adjusted her position on the sofa. If she had ever been known to blush, she might’ve just now. “There was no need for us to be in the office. It hardly came as a surprise.”

“The collapse of the Berlin Wall wasn’t a surprise?”

Eve looked as though her inner bullshit siren was wailing at a hundred decibels. And Carolyn would hate to disappoint.

“Of course not. We practically orchestrated it. Had had it pencilled in the diary for months,” Carolyn explained, knowing it would not change Eve’s disbelieving expression, but enjoying it anyway, “We had initially wanted to do it in ’88, but we worried that taking the spotlight away from Eddie the Eagle at the Winter Olympics would have made us terribly unpopular.”

“There’s no way that you and Konstantin arranged the fall of the Berlin Wall,” Eve said, snorting gracelessly.

Carolyn gave her a dry smile, “Not just Konstantin and I, of course not. It was very much a team effort. A good job, done well, on all sides.”

There was a pleasant moment that Eve promptly broke. _Of course._

“So when he said that he loved you…?”

“There is no room in this job for love, which goes part of the way in explaining why you were so bad at it,” Carolyn replied, not meaning to sound so cruel, but overcome by the memory, still raw enough to make her heart hurt. Still sharp enough to make her bleed.

 _Don’t. Say. Loved_ , she had demanded, knowing full well that it had sounded more like a beg than an order. There were words and sentiments they had whispered to one another throughout the decades, never substantive, and never with purpose, just there, as present as the tide bringing in the warm waves of the ocean. He had never used them to try and manipulate her before, and she hated him for doing it even now.

Eve looked taken aback, and Carolyn knew she had hit a nerve. Truth be told, her nerves felt frayed too. She drained the rest of her whiskey and paced across the room to refill the glass. Her hands shook a little – in anger and sorrow – and she returned to the sofa without looking across at Eve.

The silence didn’t last for long this time.

“God you’re infuriating, you know that right?” Eve exclaimed, and Carolyn looked at her, a little shocked by the outburst, “You are so condescending!”

“Well I’m sorry you feel that way-” Carolyn began, but she was cut off before she could continue.

“Oh, get you, you’re the Head of the Russian Desk, and you brought down the Berlin Wall, and you probably shagged Gorbachev whilst you were at it-”

“I did _not_ -”

“And you saw a rat drinking soda or some bullshit. God, I can never tell if you’re being serious or if you’re just, I don’t know, having a private joke with yourself by making me look stupid. Either way, it’s irritating as hell.”

Eve was on her feet now, colour steadily rising to her cheeks, and Carolyn would have been impressed had she not been so confused.

“A rat drinking soda?” she asked, perplexed, and almost slightly amused.

Eve rolled her eyes as if to say _typical, focus on the one unimportant bit_ , “Oh, that’s not the point, it was something you said to me years ago-”.

Carolyn placed the exchange and laughed in incredulity. “Oh Eve, why on earth are you still thinking about that?”

“I think about it every day! I’m never not thinking about it! It’s the most ridiculous thing I’ve ever heard! I hate that I never know if you’re lying to me – I hate that you still think you’re so above me that you can,” Eve ranted, her frustration evident in the wild gesticulations of her hands as she spoke. And though there was some unwitting humour to be found in the conversation, Carolyn looked at Eve’s darkening eyes and found herself thinking of another time, another place: of a body, smashed to bloody scarlet bits in a hotel in Rome, and the axe embedded in his skull covered in the fingerprints of the woman standing before her.

One only had to peel back the carefully appropriated veneer of normality to uncover the woman who had emerged from the chrysalis unformed and feral. It would not do to exacerbate the situation.

“Given the nature of my work, I’ll take that as a compliment,” Carolyn replied coolly, calmly, and raised her glass in an apparent toast.

“Oh piss off Carolyn,” Eve snapped, but it lacked the anticipated bite. She looked tired all of a sudden.

There was a moment when all Carolyn could hear were the heavy breaths of her former employee, and she looked up from the sofa to observe her, in all of her supposed glory. Eve was wrong to suggest that Carolyn looked down on her. It was the opposite in fact. She impressed her – she always had – but more than that, she scared her a little. And Carolyn had been playing this game long enough now to be careful around dangerous people.

“Don’t be so gauche Eve,” she said plainly, trying to bring the tension down.

“What the fuck does _that_ mean?!” Eve replied angrily, but she knew as well as Carolyn that the moment had passed.

There was an extended pause where the two women just looked at each other, before Eve collapsed back onto the sofa and drank from her glass. There was a sense that she was admitting defeat, and Carolyn found herself mildly disappointed. Eve tipped her head back and stared at the bare ceiling, letting her hair splay over the cushions. Her brogues tapped against the floor in a quiet rhythm that Carolyn did not recognise.

Carolyn knew it was her move.

“Konstantin and I, we’ve known one another for nearly half of our lives. No matter what has happened, it is difficult to turn your back on someone who has…taken up so much space,” Carolyn murmured, flinching slightly as her voice cracked unexpectedly. “And revenge can be so…” she trailed off, trying to find the right words.

“Satisfying?” Eve suggested lightly, but Carolyn shook her head.

“Disruptive. Further down the line. It never quite takes us where we want it to.” She thought briefly of Paul, who she had killed without mercy and without doubt, and knew she had destroyed any chance of finding out the truth of who taken her son from her. All for the satisfaction of stopping him breathing.

Carolyn paused for a moment before posing the next question, not knowing what reaction it would yield, “I wonder, perhaps, where you would be right now, had you sought revenge for Bill?”

Eve’s throat constricted and she spilt some of her remaining whiskey onto Carolyn’s sofa. Neither woman seemed to pay much heed to it.

In some ways, it was a low blow, but it was a question that Carolyn had always meant to ask. Eve’s husband had been collateral that she had seen coming from the very beginning – hence her suggestion to allude to an affair to get him out of the picture relatively unscathed (instead of, say, getting a pitchfork through the neck) – but Bill’s death had been a personal attack. How could Eve have forgiven that? How could she have fallen in so deep with the woman who had done that to one of her closest friends? There lay a certain hypocrisy with her lingering affection for Konstantin, but there was doubt and thirty years of friendship there – in the case of Villanelle killing Bill, there was just a knife, a dirty club in Berlin, and a woman who had taken a life to make an impression.

“Don’t do that,” Eve growled, knocking back her remaining whiskey and slamming the glass onto the coffee table, “That’s not fair.”

It was a rare day when she admitted it, but Carolyn knew she had gone too far. Her silence acted as an apology, and Eve seemed to accept it after a few minutes had passed. Once again, they turned to the rain outside – now thrashing down, as if it had a personal vendetta against the very ground on which they and the house both stood. Water lashed from the sky, and Carolyn was glad that she had opted for a glass wall. She had always so loved storms.

“How is she?” Carolyn asked, trying to sound sincere instead of hurtful. It was time for them to address the elephant in the room at any rate.

“She’s good. We’re both good,” Eve said gently, as if she resented herself for it. More than a few times Carolyn had been in the same position, reminding herself that it was okay to feel good in the face of total panic, fear, despair. There had to be some separation from the work – there had to be some space to be person away from it all. She was living proof that it could destroy you if you let it – if you had nothing else to distract you.

“You know you never actually answered me when I asked you how you were earlier,” Eve coaxed, and Carolyn reclined further back into the sofa, wishing she had stopped to get her slippers before the events of this evening had begun.

“I wouldn’t even know where to start Eve,” she said, her voice wobbling partway through her sentence, betraying the confusion that had ravaged her insides for a year, “All I can tell you is that Kenny remains…gone, and I remain almost none the wiser about what really happened to him.”

She turned to look at Eve, and wished with her whole heart that it was a year and a day ago and she could bring her son back.

“My husband and I, we made the decision to have children because we thought it would draw us back into a normal life. If we had children, we would have something to come home to besides each other; we would have something that would force us to leave our work in the office. Unfortunately, whilst it worked for him, it never quite worked for me. And yet…”

Losing Kenny had broken something in her, the same as it would any mother, though she had elected to express that brokenness in a different manner than most. However, Carolyn had quickly found that the worst consequence of his loss was the freedom it gave back to her. It was a freedom that she had realised she wanted from the moment that she found out she was pregnant with Geraldine, but one that she was never willing to pay the price for. And then someone else had paid it for her instead, and she realised that maybe clipped wings was something she could have learned to live with after all.

_What would you do if you could never see Kenny again?_

_I'd be fine. If I knew he was alright._ _Because I've always been careful._

God, she wanted to go to bed.

“I think it’s rather time that you left, Eve,” Carolyn said, not meaning to sound harsh but unable to channel the growing embarrassment in her stomach into anything else. This was exactly why she refused to talk about these things; why she had ignored Geraldine’s pleas for discussion and debate and eulogising the people that were buried too deep to hear it. This wasn’t her world. Words could barely scratch the surface of the pain that lay beneath, and so there was no point. Emotional vulnerability was not an asset. It wouldn’t do her any good to fall prey to softness now. And she was sick of people trying to make her.

Eve observed her as if she were a wild animal, and the irony made her want to choke.

“I- I’ve had a very long day, and I imagine an even longer one tomorrow,” Carolyn added, knowing that neither of them found the excuse particularly convincing.

Eve nodded slowly. “It’s okay, yeah, okay, let me just get my coat,” she said softly, and walked through to the kitchen whilst Carolyn swept quickly past her to wait by the front door. She rested her head against the door and her breath fogged up the glass; outside, the rain continued, unrelenting.

“You know,” Eve began as she walked towards her again, shrugging on her parka coat and doing up the zip, “you should consider going to therapy. Try talking to someone properly about…all of this. I see someone when I can, and it has been really helpful, processing…everything.” Eve gestured to nothing in particular, and Carolyn raised an eyebrow.

“I think we’d both have better luck with a priest,” she said drily, and Eve gave her a wry smile.

“Well she does think that my whole ‘situation’ is that I used to work for a major PR company and then defected to their closest rival, so there are some drawbacks,” Eve said magnanimously. However, she shifted uncomfortably in her new shoes and stared down at the laminated floors, trying to build up the courage to look Carolyn in the eye, and said, “But you can’t carry this around for the rest of your life. It’ll eat you alive.”

“What if it already has?”

The question was whispered into existence before Carolyn had the chance to stop it. And there it was, her blackest fear, the stuff of her nightmares: the terrifying possibility that this case had devoured her whole.

Who was she, and who would she be, at the end of it all?

Eve’s mouth dropped open in surprise, but she quickly recuperated, and Carolyn could see her itching to reach out and comfort her. She was struck by a sudden wave of affection for the woman before her, despite all of the complicated, prickly emotions she felt towards her. There was a reason she had originally chosen Eve Polastri, and it wasn’t just on the merit of her investigative prowess. Even secret government agencies needed a fraction of humanity.

“Then you come back,” Eve said, as if it were the simplest thing in the world, “People need you. There’ll always be another Berlin Wall.”

Eve made a move towards the front door, and stepped out under the porch. She pulled her hood over her lustrous hair and turned to Carolyn to say goodbye.

“You have a great capacity for goodness Eve,” Carolyn said, weighing the words deliberately, choosing them with care and precision, “Don’t squander it.”

“I’ll try not to,” Eve replied, suppressing a smile.

They took a moment to look at one another, and it was palpably bittersweet. Carolyn was overwhelmed by the creeping sensation that their next meeting would not be so bloodless.

“Enjoy the rest of your honeymoon, won’t you,” she said lightly, and Eve let out a small laugh. She nodded and began walking up the driveway towards a dark car that definitely hadn’t been out there when Carolyn had arrived home from work. A glimmer of blonde from the driver side window told Carolyn all she needed to know about who Eve’s chauffeur for the evening was.

“Oh and Eve? _Never_ break into my home again.”

She made a move to retreat into the house but had only closed the door half the way when Eve suddenly turned and shouted, “Carolyn!”

She looked up, and couldn’t tell whether the water visible on Eve’s face – glinting in the light from the closest streetlamp – were tears or the rain.

“I am sorry. I’m so sorry he’s gone. He deserved better.”

And she knew it wasn’t what Eve was implying, but Carolyn’s subconscious couldn’t help but spit out at herself the words _better than you_. The car revved, and Eve was gone before she could even begin to formulate any kind of response.

Her knees felt weak, and if she had been a different kind of woman, Carolyn might well have wept. Instead, she shut the front door behind her and, before heading up the stairs to her bed, poured herself a generous two (or perhaps three) fingers of whiskey, and grabbed her laptop from the kitchen counter.

As she climbed the staircase, Carolyn was struck for the first time at how little her house had changed over the past year. Nearly every conceivable aspect of her life had been atomised and rearranged into a pattern she barely recognised, except for this place and its bare ivory walls and sleek modernist furniture. There was scarcely a hint that another person – that other _people_ – had once inhabited this place alongside her; there were no blu tack stains, no lingering school photos, no trace of nursery scribbles or sports day medals. All that existed in this house was hers and hers alone, and with a newfound horror, Carolyn realised that this wasn’t just the way things had been for the past year, but for the past twenty at least.

She had never made space for her children. Not properly at any rate. She had allowed them into her home the same way that she had allowed Eve in tonight – rather against her will. For a moment, her subconscious entertained the thought that her son had probably died believing she resented him. And she had. But in her own, selfish way, she had loved him too.

Carolyn strode into her bathroom and removed her makeup, plastered to her face like a second skin after far too many hours of application, and resisted the urge to stare into the mirror and hope for a revelation. She had learnt that if she dared look at her reflection too long, she began to see shades of her son – the way his eyes had been carved from her skull, and the way his chin had mirrored hers without a trace of his father – and that was all too painful to manage. Instead, she gulped down half of the whiskey in her glass and made her way to her bedroom.

On her way, she passed the spare room that had once been where she used to lay her three-year-old son to bed on the rare occasion that she slipped away from the office before 10PM, and wondered – not for the first time - whether ghosts did exist, and what his would say to her now. Carolyn hoped that against all the odds, he would be able to forgive her. Given that he had inherited most of his personality from her, she might be waiting a long time for that.

Her hand hovered over the handle, but she couldn’t bring herself to push down and enter the room. Ridiculously, it still felt like an invasion of his privacy.

Stepping into her own room, Carolyn removed her earrings and her watch, and brushed a hand through her cropped hair, shaking the style out into something more comfortable. She pulled her taupe shirt over her head and clambered gracelessly out of her charcoal trousers before depositing them in a pile on the floor. She usually abhorred mess – she had berated Kenny relentlessly over the years for failing to hang up his clothes in his room – but given the events of the day, and the night, she forgave herself this one sin. She could clean tomorrow. She could iron tomorrow. She could find a gardener tomorrow. Everything and everyone in the whole world could damn well wait until tomorrow.

Carolyn switched off the light and climbed into bed, pulling the duvet over her head and wishing it were a tsunami here to drown her. But it wasn’t – it just brought the darkness, and alongside it an uneasy, restless slumber, filled with dreams of a sleeping toddler in dinosaur pyjamas, and a towering concrete wall crumbling to rubble.

**Author's Note:**

> In my mind, I am the gardener that Carolyn hires, and season 4 is just one long montage of us falling in love. Fiona Shaw can get it.


End file.
